ACID – an acronym that stands for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability – the properties that a transaction provides in relational database management systems. Changes that happen in a transaction are applied atomically, guaranteed to work with consistent data, isolated from other transactions, and the effects of a committed transaction are durable. See also the article for ACID on Wikipedia.

cloud storage – a service available over the Internet that provides highly available highly reliable virtually unlimited data storage where data protection is implemented by storing data redundantly. An example of cloud storage is Amazon S3 . See also the article for cloud storage on Wikipedia.

ClouSE – the Cloud Storage Engine for MySQL that is designed and optimized from ground up to utilize cloud storage such as Amazon S3 to store relational and blob (a.k.a. structured and non-structured) data. ClouSE provides fully functional, transactional and ACID-compliant relational data management on top of cloud storage.

eventual consistency – a guarantee that promises that when a data object is updated all readers will eventually get the updated value, i.e. some readers may still get the old value after the object is successfully updated (unlike the strict consistency guarantee that promises that all readers will get the updated value immediately). In particular Amazon S3 provides eventual consistency. See also the article for eventual consistency on Wikipedia .

LAMP– an acronym that stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP / Python / Perl – a stack of software components that comprise a popular open source platform for building general purpose web servers. See also the article for LAMP on Wikipedia.

LAMPS3 (LAMP + S3) – an acronym that stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Python / Perl and S3 – a cloud-based version of the LAMP stack that uses Amazon S3 as the storage. LAMPS3 is powered by ClouSE that makes it possible for MySQL to store data in Amazon S3.

pluggable storage engine architecture – a feature of MySQL server that enables storage engines to be loaded and unloaded from a running MySQL server. ha_clouse implements the MySQL pluggable storage engine callbacks and interfaces in order to plug ClouSE into MySQL. For more information about MySQL pluggable storage engine architecture please refer to MySQL documentation.

strict consistency enforcement – a set of algorithms and protocols that ClouSE implements to enforce strict consistency on top of eventual consistency that the cloud storage may provide. In particular Amazon S3 provides eventual consistency. Strict consistency is required to implement fully functional, transactional and ACID-compliant relational data management.

Weblob – a feature of ClouSE. From the database perspective, weblobs are regular blobs and fit naturally into the ACID model; however they also expose URLs that can be used by the client (e.g. a web browser) to download the weblob content directly from the cloud storage utility provider, bypassing the application server. Weblobs provide a simple and powerful model for a relational database developer to leverage the cloud to scale out content delivery. For some classes of applications this could lead to a significant workload scale-out. For more details refer to MySQL BLOB meets Amazon S3: Weblobs explained.

WebStor – an acronym that stands for Store to Web. WebStor is an open source library developed by OblakSoft that provides highly performant and robust access to cloud storage. WebStor documentation.

WP2Cloud – WordPress To Cloud. WP2Cloud is a plugin that extends WordPress to store media files (such as pictures) on the cloud storage. WP2Cloud plugin source code and documentation are freely available for download.

Yapixx – an acronym for Yet Another Picture Sharing Site. Yapixx is ready-to-run WordPress on cloud storage, that is configured as a picture shared site to serve as a starting point for your own beautiful yet powerful dynamic Website that seamlessly gets the benefits of cloud storage. Yapixx along with its source code is available on a fully configured FREE machine image.

Yapixx WordPress theme – a component of Yapixx site. Yapixx theme is tuned to simplify picture sharing. Yapixx theme is an optional component, it is not required in order for a website to run on top of cloud storage.